Malaysia society welfare, government policies, economics and social political development

Malaysia may introduce tough Internet laws to control bloggers and prevent them from spreading “disharmony, chaos, seditious material and lies” on their websites. [Yahoo]

We knew it’s coming didn’t we? True there are sometimes lies and defamations online, but censoring the net, or bloggers in this sense, is never a good idea.

Bloggers that the authorities can track and hunt down are probably genuine people that are sharing their ideas, while hostile bloggers just need to register an anonymous account from blogging services using a connection from cyber cafe, you can hardly crack the ‘bad apples’.

Also there are grey areas in spreading LIES. For example the son-in-law of a VIP in Malaysia are having conflict of interest with his business ventures, it’s easily seen but do bloggers need to read the whole law book for criticising his did? Common bloggers probably can’t go through the whole set of company accounts to trace frauds don’t we? So are we supposed to keep quiet regardless?

In the end tougher internet laws will lead to surppressive of freedom for speech, which is already heavily limited in Malaysia. We can laugh at China for their internet censorship until the sun rises from the West, but later on it might be the world that’s ridiculing us.